Claudia Kinkela

Claudia Kinkela is a Program Officer. She joined ACLS in 2025 after sixteen years at the National Endowment for the Humanities, where she led the Fellowship Program and later served as Assistant Director of Research. In these roles, she contributed to a wide range of research initiatives, agency-wide programs, partnerships, and peer review processes. Claudia holds a PhD in political science from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and an MA in European history and German literature. Her academic interests include political theory, European history, and the history of philosophy and literature. Before joining NEH, she taught political science at Georgetown University, American University, Duke University, and the University of Cologne. She is the author of Dolf Sternberger’s Concept of Citizenship and Contemporary German Political Thought (Königshausen & Neumann, 2001, in German).